i was doing spanish research and...
Virginity or Death!
by Katha Pollitt
Imagine a vaccine that would protect women from a serious gynecological
cancer. Wouldn't that be great? Well, both Merck and
GlaxoSmithKline recently announced that they have conducted
successful trials of vaccines that protect against the human papilloma
virus. HPV is not only an incredibly widespread sexually transmitted
infection but is responsible for at least 70 percent of cases of
cervical cancer, which is diagnosed in 10,000 American women a year and
kills 4,000. Wonderful, you are probably thinking, all we need to do is
vaccinate girls (and boys too for good measure) before they become
sexually active, around puberty, and HPV--and, in thirty or forty years,
seven in ten cases of cervical cancer--goes poof. Not so fast: We're
living in God's country now. The Christian right doesn't like the sound
of this vaccine at all. "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be
potentially harmful," Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told
the British magazine New Scientist, "because they may see it as a
license to engage in premarital sex." Raise your hand if you think that
what is keeping girls virgins now is the threat of getting cervical
cancer when they are 60 from a disease they've probably never heard of.
I remember when people rolled their eyeballs if you suggested that
opposition to abortion was less about "life" than about sex, especially
sex for women. You have to admit that thesis is looking pretty solid
these days. No matter what the consequences of sex--pregnancy, disease,
death--abstinence for singles is the only answer. Just as it's better
for gays to get AIDS than use condoms, it's better for a woman to get
cancer than have sex before marriage. It's honor killing on the
installment plan.
Christian conservatives have a special reason to be less than thrilled
about the HPV vaccine. Although not as famous as chlamydia or herpes,
HPV has the distinction of not being preventable by condoms. It's
Exhibit A in those gory high school slide shows that try to scare kids
away from sex, and it is also useful for undermining the case for
rubbers generally--why bother when you could get HPV anyway? In 2000,
Congressman (now Senator) Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who used to give
gruesome lectures on HPV for young Congressional aides, even used HPV to
propose warning labels on condoms. With HPV potentially eliminated, the
antisex brigade will lose a card it has regarded as a trump unless it
can persuade parents that vaccinating their daughters will turn them
into tramps, and that sex today is worse than cancer tomorrow. According
to New Scientist, 80 percent of parents want the vaccine for their
daughters--but their priests and pastors haven't worked them over yet.
What is it with these right-wing Christians? Faced with a choice between
sex and death, they choose death every time. No sex ed or contraception
for teens, no sex for the unwed, no condoms for gays, no abortion for
anyone--even for that poor 13-year-old pregnant girl in a group home in
Florida. I would really like to hear the persuasive argument that this
middle-schooler with no home and no family would have been better off
giving birth against her will, and that the State of Florida, which
totally failed to keep her safe, should have been allowed, against its
own laws, to compel this child to bear a child. She was too young to
have sex, too young to know her own mind about abortion--but not too
young to be forced onto the delivery table for one of the most painful
experiences human beings endure, in which the risk of death for her was
three times as great as in abortion. Ah, Christian compassion! Christian
sadism, more likely. It was the courts that showed humanity when they
let the girl terminate her pregnancy.
As they flex their political muscle, right-wing Christians increasingly
reveal their condescending view of women as moral children who need to
be kept in line sexually by fear. That's why antichoicers will never
answer the call of prochoicers to join them in reducing abortions by
making birth control more widely available: They want it to be less
available. Their real interest goes way beyond protecting fetuses--it's
in keeping sex tied to reproduction to keep women in their place. If
preventing abortion was what they cared about, they'd be giving birth
control and emergency contraception away on street corners instead of
supporting pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions and hospitals
that don't tell rape victims about the existence of EC. David Hager (see
Ayelish McGarvey's stunning exposé, and keep in mind
that unlike godless me she is a churchgoing evangelical Christian)
would never use his position with the FDA to impose his personal views
of sexual morality on women in crisis. Instead of blocking
nonprescription status for emergency contraception on the specious
grounds that it will encourage teen promiscuity, he would take note of
the six studies, three including teens, that show no relation between
sexual activity and access to EC. He would be calling the loudest for
Plan B to be stocked with the toothpaste in every drugstore in the land.
How sexist is denial of Plan B? Antichoicers may pooh-pooh the
effectiveness of condoms, but they aren't calling to restrict their sale
in order to keep boys chaste.
While the FDA dithers, the case against selling EC over the counter
weakens by the day. Besides the now exploded argument that it will let
teens run wild, opponents argue that it prevents implantation of a
fertilized egg--which would make it an "abortifacient" if you believe
that pregnancy begins when sperm and egg unite. However, new research by
the Population Council shows that EC doesn't work by blocking
implantation; it only prevents ovulation. True, it's not possible to say
it never blocks implantation, James Trussell, director of the Office of
Population Research at Princeton, told me, and to antichoice hard-liners
once in a thousand times is enough. But then, many things can block
implantation, including breast-feeding. Are the reverends going to come
out for formula-feeding now?
"It all comes down to the evils of sex," says Trussell. "That's an
ideological position impervious to empirical evidence."
from The Nation.